Cuban coronavirus vaccine to enter final phase next week

Cuba will begin the third phase of the clinical trial of two vaccines against the novel coronavirus next week and could become the first Latin American country to get an immunizer tested and manufactured nationally, executives and scientists said Thursday.

Given the good results of the first two phases and in parallel, the most advanced vaccine of them is already produced on an industrial scale, Sovereign 02, of which Cuba would have the capacity to manufacture 110 million doses in 2021 at which a other would have added the undetermined number of Abdallah appeal.

“The Cuban bet is to have very effective vaccines, the second bet is that they are very safe vaccines, the third is that they do not have the limitation of the number of doses that can be applied, you can re- immunize at six months if necessary, this for new mutations, ” the director of the Finlay Institute, Vicente Vérez, told a group of journalists during a tour of the production plants.

Cuba also has two other vaccines under study, Mambisa and Soberana 01. Neither works from live viruses but from parts of them, which in addition to being safer allow multiple inoculations. and a not so strict cold chain.

Sovereign 01 and 02 are based on the treatment of higher mammalian cells and were developed by Finlay and the Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM). Abdalá and Mambisa – for intranasal application – do so from yeast processed by the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), the experts said.

“There are two products – Abdalá and Mambisa on the one hand and Soberanas on the other – with different technologies for the same purpose,” CIGB production director Jorge Luis Vega told the Associated Press.

Cuba has a large state science hub formed in the 1980s that studies and produces many of the drugs it needs for its domestic market, including 80% of the vaccines in its national health program, which is free.

Experts said given the urgency of the spread of the new coronavirus, the island’s plan was based on analyzing a set of candidates at a time.

“Faced with a pandemic situation, we have to move forward with several strategies,” said Marta Ayala, director of ICOLD, noting that research in general for a vaccine can take 10 years and that this time the process should be completed in eight months. .

Scientists have indicated that the results of the first two phases – which focus on product safety – have been published in two articles on special pages for their peers to review, as established by the international community of Covid specialists- 19.

The third phase of the Sovereign and the Abdalá will begin between March 3 and 8, informed Eduardo Ojito, director of the CIM, which means that the inhabitants of the island will start receiving doses.

In this phase it will also be analyzed whether it is necessary to apply a third dose to reactivate the vaccine or whether it is possible to combine Sovereign 02 with another to achieve longer-term immunity.

Eduardo Martínez, director of BioCubafarma, the state-owned company that markets Cuban medicines, admitted that the world is hungry for vaccines and that the island is negotiating with some countries, but declined to give more details.

Cuba has experienced a Covid-19 epidemic since the resumption of commercial flights in November, so the government has applied new isolation measures. So far on the island there have been over 47,000 cases of the novel coronavirus and nearly 400 deaths